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  • "Perjur'd Rebel"Equivocal Allegiance and Abraham Cowley's Cutter of Coleman Street
  • Theodore F. Kaouk

The only Play that ever Mr. Cowley writ, was barbarously treated the first night, as the late Mr. Dryden has more than once informed me, who has told me that he went to see it with the famous Mr. Sprat, now Bishop of Rochester, and that after the Play was done, they both made a visit to Mr. Cowley, who the Death of his Brother had obliged to keep the House, and that Mr. Cowley received the news of ill success, not with so much firmness, as might have been expected from so great a man.

(Dennis 289)

The play whose poor reception on December 16, 1661 so disturbed poet and playwright Abraham Cowley was his Cutter of Coleman Street. First staged twenty years earlier under the title The Guardian, it was written on the occasion of the twelve-year-old Prince Charles's visit to Trinity College, Cambridge amid Parliament's growing opposition to his father. John Dennis's secondhand account presumes that Cowley's emotional reaction at hearing news of his play's failure was rooted in the potential commercial and artistic consequences of its "ill success." And there is evidence to support such a conclusion, beginning with the comedy's updated Restoration prologue, which frames the stakes of the play's production. Acknowledging the recent opening of William Davenant's Duke's Theatre as well as the emergence of new Restoration comedies, the play presents itself as a lone merchant vessel navigating uncertain critical waters on behalf of other dramatic "Shipwrights" and their anticipated ventures in theatrical production. Should its own voyage "miscarry here today," the others might better "Rot in th' Harbour stay" rather than risk similar rejection [End Page 25] (28-9).1 Here, Cowley emphasizes the risks accompanying a collective economic enterprise (especially given the hyper-vigilant, Restoration critics under whose tyranny "Trade decayes"—line 7) but, in so doing, he may also obscure his personal political investment in a play that he had substantially altered before its revival.

Without a doubt, the marked decline of royal patronage in the Restoration theater opened up a kind of vacuum that was filled, as Cowley's prologue attests, by artistic competition motivated by commercial self-interest (Maguire 102). As Eric Rothstein and Frances Kavenik have argued, Restoration theater entrepreneurs and playwrights had to cope with the political and economic fragility of the theater as an institution. Davenant and Killigrew may have competed for audiences but they shunned risk; the strategy was to appeal to a broad base of ideologically diverse customers (Rothstein and Kavenik 7-9). Hence, the pre-Civil War comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, safe bets in this respect, dominated the repertory for the first few seasons (Van Lennep cxxii). But eventually, the risks of introducing new comedies gave way to economic necessity. While Cowley's changes to Cutter may not qualify it as a "new" comedy in eyes of theater historians, it was certainly new to the commercial stage, and it was even promoted as such to justify a special increase in prices.2

Cowley's prologue, as we have seen, subordinates aesthetic considerations to economic interests even as it blurs potential opposition between the two. At the same time, however, it also occludes a third category of interest—the acquisition of what Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic capital, which includes cultural mechanisms given to "producing and guaranteeing the distribution of 'titles'" (Outline 184). Although Charles II could not afford financially to support the theater after the Restoration, he could rely on it to bolster his own symbolic capital because he had the power to restore the reputations of individuals he deemed worthy of reward.

Cowley may have had just such a transaction in mind. His changes to The Guardian, particularly in Acts 1 and 2, were arguably part of his campaign to restore his public image and thereby to achieve recognition and reward from a king he felt was indebted to him for years of service. Suggestively, Cowley distinguishes between the new plays that were being written at the time and older productions that were merely "new...

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